Texas judge orders site to identify anonymous trolls, flamers

The right to flame someone online has typically been protected by the courts …

A Texas judge has ordered an online news site to unveil identifying details about 178 anonymous commenters on the site. The order came after a couple, Mark and Rhonda Lesher, sued the numerous anonymous commenters posting to Topix.com for making what they considered to be "perverted, sick, vile, inhumane accusations" about them.

The Leshers were originally thrust into the Texas spotlight in 2008 after being accused of sexually assaulting an unidentified former client of Mark Lesher. That's when thousands of comments began piling up on the community news aggregator Topix to discuss the sexual assault charges. As with most things on the Internet, many Topix users felt free to let loose with nasty comments about the Leshers.

The Leshers were found not guilty of the charges after a criminal trial. That, however, wasn't the end of the 70-some individual threads posted to Topix about them. "It just... basically made us both feel like common criminals," the Leshers told the Dallas Morning News (via TechDirt). "It's like someone had basically raped us of our reputation and our standing in the community over and over and over again."

That's when the Leshers chose to sue a number of Topix's anonymous commenters (but, interestingly, not Topix itself). The law firm representing the couple, Connor & Demond PLLC in Austin, told Computerworld that the lawsuit was limited specifically to the posters whose statements were considered defamatory under Texas law.

The complaint filed by the Leshers details many of the comments made by the anonymous defendants. Some are certainly lower blows than others—insinuating that Mark drugs women and that Rhonda is the "Herpies Queen," and that the couple may have AIDS, among other things—but not all of the comments are as bad. Some merely accuse the Leshers of being liars, and others even say to wait for confirmation of some of the accusations.

Regardless of what we think of the comments, however, a Tarrant County judge clearly felt that they were libelous enough to order Topix to cough up personal information on the anonymous posters. The problem is that this order seems to ignore a number of previous rulings protecting the anonymity of Internet commenters, no matter how trollish.

In 2005, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled that an anonymous blogger could remain anonymous after being sued by a local councilman and his wife. The blog in question had questioned the councilman's sexual proclivities, among other things, which the couple considered defamatory. A lower court granted the request to identify the blogger, but the Daleware Supreme Court overturned the decision. Then, in January of 2008, two female law students who were the target of vicious online attacks admitted that they had been unsuccessful in digging up personal information about a handful of anonymous posters, and had so far hit a dead end when it came to getting a court order.

One month later, a California appeals court reversed a previous decision that would have allowed Lisa Krinsky, COO of a Florida-based drug service company, to subpoena 10 anonymous Yahoo message board posters' real names. The court said that the commenters were allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights and speak their minds, even though some of the comments were quite scathing and potentially libelous.

Topix, for its part, appears to be doing its best to ensure that it only hands over exactly what is required, and not a bit more. Topix CEO Chris Tolles told Computerworld that the company takes privacy very seriously, and that the company would not "simply hand over all of our records" without reviewing the subpoena in detail. "We prefer to make sure requests are clear and specific and not overly broad," he said. According to the order, Topix has until March 6 to give up the information.